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…a goodly number of us dreamers are going to ruefully reflect that it was entirely possible for humanity to establish off-planet settlements following the Apollo program. Settlements that likely could have been self-sustaining by now because in the alternate reality where humankind put as much effort and resources and brains as possible behind establishing populations outside this fragile egg basket we call Earth, the early ones could have been in orbit and on the moon in the 1980s.

There could have been nearly 40 years to chase the kinks out of the recycling loops and life support and hydroponics. To build solar power plants all over the darn place up there and drag a water-ice comet into Earth orbit if we couldn’t find enough to fling up to orbital colonies from Luna with mass drivers.

40 years to send more and more people up and for people to start being born up there.

40 years to establish a reservoir of human beings and our technological knowledge out of range of Kim Jong-Un and Kim Jong-Trump (brothers of another ego-rage-spiritual mother) and their shoe-on-podium nuclear chest-beating.

The question is, does President Donald “Joffrey” Trump think he’s having a fun wrestling-entertainment-style feud with CNN and most of the rest of the US press in order to boost his personal ratings, as if he were a television show himself?

Or is Donald J. Trump having a Kim-family-of-North-Korea kind of experience, finding himself enraged that the people His Royal Totally Not A King-ness owns dare do something other than gather in solemn worship of The Totally Not Thinning Or Dyed Haired Demigod Who Walks Among Us Little People?

Have you noticed he keeps having rallies? Either he must refresh himself with the blood of mortals on a regular basis or he’s having rallies so he can bask in adulation and remind himself he is worshiped. Which, really, are almost the same thing.

And he does think he’s having a fun feud (I’m sure he’s enjoying himself to some extent, rubbing his hands together and muttering to himself, “that’ll really piss them off” like a standard-issue online troll). But it’s not just fun, it’s active publicity seeking. After all, doing outrageous things for the press is the way he kept his name in the public eye for decades. He craves attention terribly — if only his parents had frickin’ hugged him once in a while we might not be where we are. But we can say that about a lot of famous White (mostly) guys (mostly) who for some reason are always referred to by all three of their names, Donald John Trump.

He obviously loves working a crowd up, and political crowds probably give him the loudest cheers he’s gotten in his life. I’m sure it feels like a blast of pure crack to the naked brain for a lifelong attention junkie. To get those big rally cheers he’s got to keep the mob worked up. If they start thinking the cheers might become less lusty. We see the understanding of that in the disdain and disgust for things like education, expertise, and experience, which he campaigned against nearly as much as he campaigned against Hillary Clinton, and which he has mostly driven out of the Executive Branch and anywhere his direct influence can comfortably reach. It dovetails nicely with the pseudo-anarchic smash-everything-ism of (co-?) President Bannon, as well.

Keeping the mob riled up and validating his feelings of superiority also keeps bothersome qualities like reason, empathy, and humanity from surfacing in his vicinity. And those would be problematic for him because not only might someone question him instead of just shouting WOOO! YEAH! but also I’d say his entire life as a unit is a long illustration of the fact that he just doesn’t get those things. In fact, not only does Donny “the J stands for “teeny hands”” Trump not understand reason, empathy, and humanity, but he appears to hate and be disgusted by those qualities.

Which perhaps is a way of life he learned at the knee of Daddy The Slumlord or Daddy the Racist or Daddy Who Never Said I Love You But Called Poor Little Donny A Screwup Way Too Often.

Which, yes, is sad. But we’re the ones suffering for it. If he’s suffering, it’s down deep in a withered empty shell where once he hid the nascent humanity of his youth, but now keeps a raisin that is probably long dead like an inhabitant of the crawlspace under the house of that famous clown’s house.

At seventy-one years old, he has made the awful lessons he learned his own, and has obviously passed it down to his cold, casually-dehumanizing progeny. A proud heritage.

Before I go further, let me bring the title in.

You can see the watermarks — see the original on Cagle.com and then go on to read hundreds of other political cartoons there because humor is good medicine for worrisome times.

Journalists who publish things other than the praise and uncritical adulation Trump craves are, in his words, “the enemy of the American people.” By which he means that as President, the United States is a thing he owns and therefore the people in it are things he owns and therefore people who are journalists and don’t do exactly what he wants are broken things he owns that defy him. And those are things to be hated and crushed.

Your free press is to be hated and crushed.

Your free speech is to be hated and crushed.

You, too, are an enemy of the people, unless you come to praise and only praise Lord Donald “Being Born Rich Makes Me Better Than Mere Humans” Trumpet Solo.

But, you say, it’s all hyperbole.

I say, he doesn’t know what that is. He believes in his own superiority and your inferiority. He believes it deep down and he avoids thinking otherwise, because he avoids thinking. He has told us just that many times.

All the rest of what I’ve said follows because he has no introspection and/or ambition to be a better person. He sees no need. He believes he is already the best person ever, and he has believed that since grade school.

He doesn’t think. He hasn’t the depth to keep someone by his side to whisper “you are just a man” into his ear. He hasn’t — he avoids — understanding who and what he is and why he does what he does and thinks what he thinks and feels what he feels and wants what he wants.

All of the above bleeds and oozes from his every word and action because he doesn’t understand hyperbole, but chooses it as a way of life and mode of communication. And he doesn’t understand civil rights, society, the press, government, human beings, or himself. Period. He’s the ultimate know-nothing, and he doesn’t want to know anything about you except whether or not you’re a Trump worshiper or the enemy.

This is a short tale of weirdness after a storm — I’ll let the opening paragraphs speak for themselves:

Eventually, the walls-strumming throb of the tornado passed and the family emerged from their storm nest in the hallway. They had ridden through the storm—the hail and rain hammering on the walls, the gusts rocking the trailer home side to side on its blocks, the thunder shaking the roof, and finally the open-throated steam engine chug of the funnel cloud itself—encapsulated in the mattresses rushed from their beds and stood up against the hallway walls to cushion them in case the trailer rolled over. But it hadn’t.

The storm had been black, choking off the little bit of light that illuminated the hall from the living room on a sunny day. After the hail the electric lights had failed. The lights were still out, but now a weak sun filtered in again, gray.

Paul rushed ahead of his parents and little brother on the energy of thirteen, threw open the door and the screen, and burst out onto the open porch. Twigs, leaves, and small branches torn out of the big maple between them and the next trailer thirty feet over crunched under his sneakers. From the maple, from the woods engulfing their end of the trailer park, branches and leaves covered the grass and the gravel road, a green and brown carpet with only a few worn patches showing what lay underneath. Paul looked up. The clouds trailing the storm were high and thin, ragged, sending down random momentary sprinkles. The air was fresh, washed, green with the sap of bruised leaves and broken trees. Paul sucked in a deep breath, alive in the wake of the storm’s fear.

“We made it!” he shouted as his family crowded onto the porch. He ran down the steps into the yard, and from there he saw it between the back of the trailer and the woods. A refrigerator, tall and white but not square like all the ones he’d seen before. This one was rounded and smooth like an enormous bar of soap. The handle on the front was short, chrome worn dull on one end and attached to the fridge only on the other. The fat and round black power cord disappeared into the undergrowth of the woods’ edge as if it were plugged into the ferns and sticky sundews that grew there…

By my headline, I’m not asking if there are any current stories about dystopian science fiction in the news. I’m asking if perhaps the things we see on the news are influencing the science fiction we writers write. Science fiction is speculation about what the future may bring, but like all literature and art it is a reflection of the context of the writer. It is a reflection of cultural context, of what the writer thinks the world is now and what that might develop into as time proceeds.

A while back, I asked if pessimism in US-authored science fiction might reflect a perception — arguably, a reality — that the USA is declining from a peak of prosperity and power. I think that thought has merit, and I think it’s linked to what I’m talking about here.

Yes, this post is sadly inspired by the injustice and violence we have seen in Ferguson, Missouri over the last four months; the scene above from the events of November 24th is rapidly becoming an iconic symbol of social order at any cost, militarization of police, and the deep frustration of people — here, the black community of Ferguson — who feel that working within the system has failed them, the system has failed them, and the system will not validate even something so basic as their right to be the equal of every other US citizen under the law.

That’s dystopianism. People denied their rights, human or legal, that those above them have. We see it rearing its head in the United States, and many of us hoped, somehow, that the worst was over. That privilege and oppression were the language of the past in our country, and that the exceptions we saw were just that: exceptions.

But that has always been the hope of the sheltered, the hope of those who are less oppressed, the hope of those who see opportunity. Too many of us have never really known those hopes. Before the internet, before the explosion of social media and hand-portable smartphones capable of livestreaming video in the hands of ordinary citizens, it was easier to be sheltered.

Year by year, it is more difficult to be sheltered, more difficult to deny uncomfortable truths of inequality that the internet holds in front of our faces. Not only in the USA, but abroad, we more and more frequently see tweets and Facebook updates and blogs and YouTube videos and so on and so forth from oppressed people and groups around the world.

The internet and the smartphone are doing for this generation what television did for the Vietnam War. We’re getting a look, collectively, all of us who have access to the internet, a look at dirt that has traditionally been swept under the rug and stayed there, invisible. It’s far easier to see it for what it is now than it has ever been before.

And that’s sort of depressing. Right now, many of us are depressed by what we see in the world, and we’re afraid it’s only going to get worse. Perhaps this exposure will continue to grow and my little ones will grow up in a time marked by reform and renewed optimism. I can hope. I’ll try to write about that.

But right now, I’m just sad and it is FAR too easy to proceed from watching dystopian current events to writing dystopian science fiction.

So, after several hundred years of eating whales and/or boiling them down for lamp oil followed by several decades of study, a few human scientists have decided that dolphins and whales are basically…

…well, basically people. Self-aware sentient beings. With whom we have no idea how to communicate effectively. And, here and there, we’re still eating.

It’s a hell of a first contact story, isn’t it? If ever someone was in need of a magic Star Trek translator, it’s us. Makes you think about how quick and easy it might be to communicate with any aliens we might run into in the future, if in fact we run into any at all.